The Mind's Construction in the Face

In a phone conversation on Thursday 26 November 2015, the director of the Channel Four documentary Shakespeare's Tomb tried very hard to assure me that the programme would not be spending very much time at Beoley, was not terribly interested in the skull, and didn't expect to discover much about the mysterious "veritable skull of William Shakespeare."

The director seemed startled when I mentioned Dr Caroline Wilkinson, who I already knew was involved.  No, I was told, Caroline Wilkinson probably wasn't going to be doing much with the skull - at most, maybe coming up with some thoughts about possible age and gender - and she almost certainly wouldn't be doing any sort of facial reconstruction from the skull or anything like that at all.

I'm still at a loss to explain why the director told me all that, unless it was to throw me off the scent.  Given that I had only just been made aware of the fact that I was no longer involved with the documentary, I can imagine that she was trying to mollify my (i.e. "No, don't worry, we won't be doing anything that directly concerns you and your work") or, to put it another way, I was being fobbed off and kept in the dark.

Anyway, surprise-surprise, Dr Wilkinson did do something of a facial reconstruction from the skull after all.  Maybe she had a bit of time on her hands, I don't know, or maybe that was the plan all along but the director didn't want me to know about it.  The image above is partly that of Dr Wilkinson's reconstruction, made under the apprehension that the skull is that of an "unknown woman in her seventies".  Obviously, for copyright reasons, I haven't reproduced the whole image.

Something about the eyes in the reconstruction reminded me of an early 17th-century portrait in the royal collection.  This portrait of an unknown man was flagged up by Lee Durkee on his fascinating Lost Shakespeare Portraits blog.  Lee Durkee knows his stuff, and when he suggests that the "unknown man" in the portrait might be Shakespeare, I'm inclined to think he might be onto something.

So the image of an "unknown female" you see at the top of the blog has been merged with the features of the "unknown man" from the portrait in the royal collection.  Look closely: it's difficult to see where the "unknown man" ends and the "unknown female" begins.

Now to the reproduction image proper.  For some bizarre reason, the forehead reproduced from the skull has been blurred.  This has the effect of focusing attention on the central features of the face - eyes, nose and mouth.  It is unfortunate, because (as those who follow my work will know) many of the identifying features of the skull which also show up, with a remarkable degree of consistency, in the Shakespeare portraiture, are to be found on the forehead.  Which, in the image taken from the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, has been blurred.

Moreover, the forehead is one of the best-preserved parts of the skull.  It is pretty much intact.  The face of the skull has been smashed to bits (much of that damage, I believe, done at around the time of death).  Which means that much of what we see most clearly of the face in the reconstruction is not actually taken from the skull, because those parts don't actually exist.  Where it is most in focus, then, the reconstruction is based on a reconstruction.

You have a laser scan of a damaged skull, onto which have been projected (we must assume) the missing parts of the structure (cheekbones, maxilla, lower jaw).  In other words, the facial reconstruction shown in the programme is based on another reconstruction - the conjectural reconstruction of the missing parts of the skull - which is itself based, not on the original skull, but on a laser scan thereof.

Complicated, isn't it?  But the point to be made here is that those parts of the skull which do exist, and which we ought to be able to see very clearly in the facial reconstruction, have been largely blurred, while those parts of the skull which don't exist, and therefore had to be speculatively reconstructed, have been rendered rather clearly.

Odd, hunh?  Even so, the image yields some interesting surprises.  Let me concentrate on the left eye, temple and forehead as shown in the facial reconstruction (part of which is blurred) for the Channel Four programme:

Let's start with the forehead.  Blurred though it is - so as not to give the game away - some features can still be made out.  Looking up from the outside half of the eye, it is quite clear that there are a couple of grooves or indentations, running down from the hairline, with something resembling a raised area in between.

I've blogged about this feature before: in Call ye Midwife I suggested that, along with a defining depression high up in the forehead, just left of centre, they were the result of the rushed and insanitary midwifery practices of the day, while in Shakespeare's Face (3) I used them as part of my evidence to indicate that the somewhat controversial Cobbe portrait is indeed of William Shakespeare.

Basically, that double groove running down the left side of the forehead is a fairly consistent feature of the Shakespeare portraiture.  And, let's remember, it's there on the skull - one of the remaining parts of the skull - from which Dr Wilkinson made her reconstruction.

Moving down a bit, there seems to be evidence of a scar running across the top of the left eyebrow.  I examined this in my 2014 paper for Goldsmiths University, The Faces of Shakespeare.  Again, the skull concurs with the portraiture, the scar being especially visible on the Wadlow portrait.

The outside of the left eye shows what appear to be two lines descending to meet in a sort of V-shape immediately to the left of the eye.  I have written about this extensively, describing and illustrating this feature in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and elsewhere.  It is another defining feature of Shakespeare portraiture and is caused by the breakage of the end of the facial bone and the lower edge of the orbit showing through the skin.  The crease which comes round from the left, just under the eye, in the reconstruction is also a feature of Shakespeare portraiture, clearly visible in the Droeshout engraving (First Folio, 1623) and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery).

The damage to the lower part of the eye socket shows up both in the Shakespeare portraiture (often as a faint, thin, bluish or greyish line, as in the Wadlow portrait) and is replicated in the facial reconstruction as a sort of puffy, saggy, bags-under-the-eyes look.  Indeed, a forensic archaeologist and biological anthropologist who studied the photos of the skull told me that the "guttering" at the bottom of the eye sockets would produce just such a look in the portraits.

Just inside the eye, alongside the nose, there is shading and a minor blemish, consistent with the portraits (the Cobbe shows this as a sort of bluish tinge with what a friend, who has seen the Cobbe portrait at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, described as a "slight boil or deformity on the nose side of the left eye orbit").  This is where a pointed instrument, a stabbing weapon such a poignard, was jabbed into the eye socket, puncturing the inner medial wall of the left eye.  This forced the eyeball forwards, and slightly to the left, as we see in the death mask and the "wall-eyed" look of the portraits.  The death mask shows the scar made by this weapon.  The portraits, and the facial reconstruction, reflect the damage that was done to the inner eye socket by this stabbing weapon (for more on this, see my paper for Goldsmiths and my Historical Honey article, Shakespeare and the Dragonfly.)

Finally, the cheek.  First of all, there appears to be something of a swelling, a raised area, where the (missing) cheekbone should be - and curiously enough, something very similar appears in much the same place on Dr Wilkinson's facial reconstruction of the Darmstadt death mask (Shakespeare, again). 

Look more closely at the facial reconstruction and you'll see a thin line meandering slightly as it runs down the left cheek, from just beneath the eye to just to the side of the mouth.  That really is a giveaway: you'll find it in the portraits, too, especially the Chandos, where I first noticed it - a thin grey slightly wavy line running own the left cheek, with another, fainter but similar, immediately to the left of it.

That's the outline of the broken maxilla (upper jaw).

So - even though they did their best to misinterpret certain features of the skull and to obscure the others, the facial reconstruction which Dr Wilkinson apparently wasn't going to do but then went ahead and did anyway does, in fact, confirm that the Beoley skull matches the portraiture of William Shakespeare.

How much longer, I ask you, must we allow the cover-up to go unchallenged and the world to remain in the dark about the true identity of the owner of the Beoley skull?

Historical Honey is Back!

Those wonderful honeys have relaunched their Historical Honey website. 

First up, a piece by yours truly, flagging up a rather interesting development concerning a certain disarticulated human skull, an archaeologist from the University of Staffordshire, and a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary.

Read all about it here.

City of Gangs

Here's the link to a review I wrote for the wonderful Historical Honey website.

Pure Honey

Just found out today that one of the most popular posts ever on the excellent Historical Honey website was this one - All is True: Fire at the Globe Theatre - which was the first post I wrote for them last year.

Pretty pleased with that!

Wow - A Fantastic Review!

This is just too good not to share.

Who Killed William Shakespeare? gets a wonderful review on the Historical Honey website.  Please have a read :)

Shakespeare "Not a Very Tall Man"

Between delivering your manuscript and seeing your book in print, there's a gap.  In the case of Who Killed William Shakespeare? that gap was about ten months.

It's a tricky period because, mentally, you're still writing your book.  Is there something you've missed, something you need to put in, something that could be better expressed? 

One of the little things I fussed about and mulled over endlessly, while waiting for the proofs of my book to arrive, was whether to address the issue of Shakespeare's height.  Not a common problem, perhaps; it doesn't seem to have bothered many of his biographers.  But it bothered me.  Because I had this sneaking feeling that Shakespeare was probably quite short.

The idea that Will was not exactly a giant had grown, slowly, fed by the odd hint here and there.  It also came from the fact that the skull in the Sheldon family crypt at Beoley church (which as regular readers, or those blessed souls who have read Who Killed William Shakespeare? will know, was probably Shakespeare's skull) was described in the 19th century as "undersized".  More recently, a former churchwarden of Beoley, who has both seen and photographed the skull, told me that it was "small" - as if it were a woman's skull, or the skull of a child.

Of course, if you've read the book you'll know that parts of the skull are missing.  But it still seems to have struck observers as being small.  Rev. Charles Jones Langston, writing his account of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found in 1884, made the point twice.  And yet he was convinced that the skull was Shakespeare's.

I ummed and ahhed about mentioning Shakespeare's height in the book because I had picked up on a few hints, a few references, which could be interpreted as indicating that Will was a little on the short side.  In Sonnet 80, he compared himself unfavourably with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was about six feet tall; Raleigh, the "Rival Poet", was "of tall building and of goodly pride", and Will's "saucy barque" was "inferior far to his".

Other hints came in Ben Jonson's An Execration Upon Vulcan.  Jonson's library had just gone up in smoke, a mere month before the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.  Ben Jonson thought back to the burning of the Globe theatre, ten years earlier, and I suspect that just as he appears to have blamed Shakespeare for the fire at the Globe, so he saw Shakespeare's influence behind his own catastrophic fire (even though Shakespeare had been dead for more than seven years when Ben's study went up in flames).

The traditional story of the Globe fire holds that it was caused by the firing of two cannons.  Ben Jonson suggested otherwise:

Nay, sigh’d, ah Sister ’twas the Nun, Kate Arden
Kindled the Fire! But, then did one return,
No Fool would his own harvest spoil, or burn!
If that were so, thou rather would’st advance
The Place, that was thy Wives Inheritance.

In this strange passage, the "Nun", Kate Arden, magically transforms into a "Fool" who wouldn't - surely he wouldn't! - wreck his own nest egg.  The Arden surname points at Shakespeare.  The word "kate" or "cate" could be interpreted in two ways: either as a "picklock", a tool for breaking into a locked building, or as something "small" and "dainty".

I held back, however, on tentatively advancing my notion that Shakespeare might have been of modest stature.  But maybe I was right.

Two portraits of Shakespeare have recently been unveiled by Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel.  These portraits are reproduced above (images courtesy of Discovery News).  Neither is an original.  Rather, the one is a photo of a portrait that went missing during the Second World War, the other being an engraving published in 1824.

However, the engraving - or "Boaden" portrait - would appear to have been modelled on an original portrait, now lost.  Those facial features (wonky left eye, damaged or drooping left eyebrow, depressions high up in forehead) which I have come to see as authentically Shakespearean are present and correct.  It is based, then, on a genuine likeness of Shakespeare.

But here's the really exciting bit: the "Boaden" portrait is unique in showing Shakespeare's whole body.  And as Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel was moved to remark about the "Boaden" - "We can see he wasn't a very tall man."

So maybe I was right: maybe Shakespeare was small and dainty (a "cate"), and "undersized", as is the skull at Beoley.

(There's something else about the "Boaden" portrait - anyone who's read my recent article on the Historical Honey website will know that another, and I believe more interesting, portrait has an unusual detail in the form of a dragonfly-shaped knot or bow poking through the doublet; that detail is so unusual that a professional period costume expert admitted she'd never seen a bow poking through a doublet like that before.  Take a look at the detail from the "Boaden" portrait, above; there's another bow.)

Anyway, I think we can begin to think of Shakespeare as being rather delicately formed.  He "wasn't a very tall man", which only adds extra weight to the possibility that the skull at Beoley church is his.

Shakespeare's First Love

Ladies and gentlemen ...

I've had another article published online in the past few days.  Following hot on the heels of my piece about a "new" Shakespeare portrait, which appeared on the excellent Historical Honey website (www.historicalhoney.com), the following article was published on the equally wonderful History Vault site.  Please click on the link below:

Shakespeare's Lovers Part One: The White Lady

Part Two will be published on 15 March.

And I'll be back soon with a proper blogpost!

Face to Face with Shakespeare

Lots of news in the world of Shakespeare portraiture.

Here's my contribution - Shakespeare and the Dragonfly - with huge thanks to Historical Honey.

I'll blog about the Shakespeare images recently unveiled by Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel very soon.  For now, good people, please enjoy my very brief introduction to the "Wadlow" portrait by clicking the link above.

Reviews, News, Interviews

Today, we're playing catch up.  Or archiving, if you prefer.

First, some news.  I have a couple of talks booked for the near future.

The first will take place at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 20 March and is entitled The Faces of Shakespeare: Revealing Shakespeare's Life and Death Through Portraits and Other Objects - should be an interesting one, as I expect to unveil a "new" portrait of William Shakespeare, and it's free to attend!  So, if you're in the area ...

After that, I have an appearance at Stratford Literary Festival on 29 April.  Not free to attend, that one, but for a mere £8 you get me talking about Who Killed William Shakespeare?, plus tea and cake!  It'll be just days after the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

I've also had a couple of interviews published online lately: one with the lovely Stephanie Moore Hopkins for her Layered Pages blog, the other for Paula Lofting, tireless mastermind of the Review Group blog (Simon Stirling Discusses the Mysteries of Shakespeare).

But that's not all!  I've also been indulging in a bit of book reviewing myself.  So, for your information and/or delectation:

My review of Keane's Company by Iain Gale for the fantastic Historical Honey website can be found here.

My review of Nancy Jardine's The Beltane Choice for the Review Group can be found here.

And finally, my affectionate tribute to Richard Findlater's lovely old theatrical biography of Grimaldi, King of Clowns can be read here.

Plenty more of that sort of thing to come, folks, and I'll do my damnedest to keep you posted about it all.  Meanwhile, in other news, I'm now on Twitter - @WhoKilledWill.

Onwards and upwards ...

New Review Blog Launched TODAY

The ecology of publishing is changing.

In the Industrial Age, books were printed and bound in quantitites.  They were then transported, stored, distributed and stacked.  It was an expensive and fairly complex process, but essentially the same as any sort of manufacturing industry.

That still goes on, of course.  But new technology has allowed alternative publishing models to thrive.  Now, a writer can register online with a print-on-demand company.  He or she can then create two files (one for the inside of the book, one for the outside) and send them to the printers.  A bar code or "ISBN" on the book means that all the relevant details can then be displayed by online booksellers, such as the mighty Amazon.  When the book is ordered, the message goes out to the printers, and a copy is printed, bound, packaged and sent out.  Overheads ... practically nil.

And then there are ebooks.  Once a book has been written, edited, formatted and converted into the right kind of file, the sky is the limit here.  Any number of ebooks can be sold and instantly despatched to ebook readers at no real cost.  There aren't any production overheads: as long as the consumer has a Kindle, a tablet, a computer, an ebook reader, then the book can be "produced" for free.  Which means that most of the profits go straight to the author.

What this means is that a whole new publishing industry has developed.  Gone are the old, painful processes of acquiring agents, approaching publishers, piles of rejection letters, long waits and tiny royalties.  Publishing can now be almost instantaneous.  Everything is in the hands of the writer now.

But what about the reader?  Well, there's suddenly a lot more choice out there.  And most books published by the new methods are considerably cheaper to buy than those which have gone through the traditional process.  A newly published ebook, or nicely-produced print-on-demand copy, can be purchased for - what? - about $3 maybe.

When there's an explosion of new product, readily accessible at relatively low cost, a new form of marketing has to emerge.  The old system relied on the marketing contacts, resources and budgets of the publishing houses.  The new system relies on networking, social media and recommendations.

Reviewing books is effectively the new trend.  It's about the only way that a reader and prospective purchaser can decide whether or not they want to try out a new book.  And this year, reviewing is taking off in a BIG way.  I've just received a new hardback novel to review for one of my favourite historical websites (those lovely Historical Honeys), and will soon be getting a couple more to review from the fascinating Moon Books stable. 

Authors are going to be spending a lot more of their time reviewing other authors' books, because we can no longer rely on the traditional marketing methods.  Now, we do it ourselves.

So ... it gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of a new blog dedicated to reviews of new books, along with author interviews, competitions and prize giveaways.  This REVIEW blog grew out of a very active and exciting Facebook group, and such has been the interest in the new REVIEW group blog that the official launch party has been extended from a week to a fortnight!

Please pop over and have a look.  My day is Day 6 - Thursday - and I'll be giving away a free signed copy of Who Killed William Shakespeare? to go with my own blogpost about historical fact and fiction.

This is how we do things nowadays.  The old media are lumbering along.  New media is where publishing is really happening.

http://thereviewgroup.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/welcome-to-review-group-blog.html

Historical Honey

Thrilled to see what the Historical Honey website has made of my short piece about the fire at the Globe theatre in 1613.

http://www.historicalhoney.com/all-is-true-fire-at-the-globe-theatre/

They've got a great site going, those Honeys (I'm now Honey 035, by the way), and it's definitely worth a look.  History never looked so good!

So now I have to figure out what I might want to offer them next.  Something about Arthur, perhaps?